Posted
by
Cliff
on Sunday December 22, 2002 @04:59AM
from the for-your-amusement dept.

clutch110 asks: "I have been tasked with coming up with a name for our soon-to-be server room. Our president is renowned for these small tasks. I was told to create something funny and not nearly as obvious as 'Company Server Room'. So I come in hope that your everlasting humor can help me complete my quest for the most unique server room name in existance."

Speaking of a place where females service males. Why not name the servers Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Doc, etc. and call the room Snow White. It's the place where the one female is servicing all the males dwarves.

...the college of engineering at my old university did something similar with the isolated subnets.

There'd be a bunch of machines, called bilbo, frodo, gandalf, etc, on a net of their own, and diamond, ruby, emerald, etc, on a net of their own. For each net, another machine with two network cards would be their bridge to the outside world. Each of the network cards had its own name -- and this is where the geekiness comes out -- and the names would be for the same thing.

So one card on the bridge would be rivendell, and the other would be imladris. One card would be gem and the other jewel. Things like that. One of the sysadmins had never read Tolkien, and the network topology of room 355 always confused him until someone explained the names.

He forgot to mention that, at his president's request, the bathroom already bears the well-deserved title "Fortress of Solitude."

With enough unnecessary drooping wires, flat panel displays, and strategically placed green cold cathode lamps, you could easily call it "The Nebuchadnezzar (or The Core thereof)" and the office would be called The City of Zion. The same decor would work for a Borg Cube theme, and all the "message from the sysadmin" letters would start with "We Are The Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

I always wanted to do that. "Umm, my computer is broken, I can't do my work..." "YOUR COMPUTER IS IRRELEVANT. WORK IS IRRELEVANT. YOU WILL SURRENDER...Oh, sorry, permissions were set wrong, you should be ok now."

I've heard many stories about the server farm that NeXT used to have in their Redwood City, California office. Their "Bat Cave" was a small room packed full of black NeXT cubes and slabs. It's been rumored that much of the NeXT server farm still exists at Apple, as does a collection of every NeXT model and OS version on display for testing and "research".

You can name up to twenty servers this way, if you want to name the next 17 after the Angels [aublue.com] --- Lilith, Adam, Sachiel, Samshel, Ramiel, Gaghiel, Israfel, Sandalphon, Matarael, Sahaquiel, Ireul, Leliel, Bardiel, Zeruel, Arael, Armisael, Tabris

Of course, if you don't like it, you can just start naming computers after Muppets until you get tired. There are a freaking lot [muppets.com] of Muppets.

Um..I wasn't aware that Lilith was an angel. I've see her called many things from the mother of Demons to the first woman, but never an angel.
My personal favorite Angel is Arariel, the Curer of Stupidity.

Then you should come to my company's server room. It set so they can take clients through on tours, and they WON'T need a coat. It's the warmest server room I've ever been in. In fact, due to their poor planning, there are spots in the room that actually make you sweat as they are so hot.

Oh and they just built this room like 6 months ago, so it has 3 industral air conditioning units....

The room of lost souls?
The room of eternal dispair
The "mybosswantedmetocomeupwithanameforthis" Room
The Bathroom
The Transporter Room
The...oh hey look a bunny!
if you are running linux servers
Anarctica
The Penguin Room
If you are running windows servers
The Oh Please God(s) Kill Me Now room

In the spirt of Peter's Evil Overlord list:65. If I must have computer systems with publically available terminals, the maps they display of my complex will have a room clearly marked as the Main Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber. The actual main control room will be marked as Sewage Overflow Containment.

Washington DC has a combined sewer system. Basically, this means that there are not seperate sanitary (ie, toilets) and storm sewers. When there hasn't been rain in a while, leaves and other assorted trash will collect up in the storm sewers. When a hard rain comes, it will back up the storm sewers, and there's always a questions of exactly what else might have floated up from the drains.

Our machine room just happens to be in a basement. [Until a couple of years back, there was a glass wall to the outside, too, so it obviously wasn't well planned] I think it was late 2000 (maybe early 2001), when we had a sewer backup on the same block our building was. There was an inch or so of standing water on the ground floor. There was sewage leaking from the ceiling above into our machine room, onto the machines, and into flooring [raised floor, so of course, all of the power runs through the floor].

Needless to say, the smell was not so wonderful, although anything chunky was filtered out by the seeping through the concrete floor/ceiling. It did manage to cause the ceiling tiles in the machine room to crumble, and they had to replace anything that couldn't be easily disinfected in another room on that floor (chairs, cubicle walls, etc).

Build a redundant button into the wall, and put a sign above it that says: "Do Not Push!". Then see how many people you can get to push it, and show it at X-Mas parties.

Does anyone remember 'the really big button that doesn't do anything' web page? That was hilarious.

Anyway, if it's Linux, call it Anchorage, then put some cool arctic style posters up with penquins along the shoreline. We had a room call Bedrock once. The main server was called Wilma, other nicknames Barney, Fred and a little mac mail server was called Pebbles. I'm into simple names now, like 'The Hub'. Sort of like 'the pub' because everyone comes in to hang out, but there's no booze.

You could also call it the Don't Panic room, or the Champagne Room, or the One True Server Room, or the Fruity Pebbles room, or the Room Without A Window, or the Mush Room, or the Big Blue Room (or, alternatively, the Little White/Gray/Whatever Room).

You asked for unique though. Most unique thing I can think of is to cat/dev/urandom or whatever that command is, then tack the output on the door. If you wanted to be really creative, you could put up a little LED sign that outputs/dev/urandom. That way your server room will always have a unique name. Everyone will just refer to it as the server room no matter what name you pick, so why not give them a good reason to use the generic term?

For example: CHIWST, Chicago West datacenter. West could be the part of the city, or the part of the building. Add a number on the end if you're feeling kinky. Or maybe something obvious to the front like "DC".

You won't get slammed if what you end up creating makes some logical sense, though. You could call it "CHARLIE" and name the next datacenter (if there is one) "DELTA".

tr.v. tasked, tasking, tasks
1. To assign a task to or impose a task on.
2. To overburden with labor; tax.

Another entry at dictionary.com even gives an example sentence:

v 1: assign a task to; "I tasked him with looking after the children"

So it is in fact correct to use "task" as a verb. (Now if you want to get really nitpicky, one might argue that it would be more correct to say "My boss tasked me...", since task seems to refer to the process of assigning a task, not receiving a task.)

One of my customers has a lab in an unlikely part of the building. On the door it says "Accounts Receivable." When you walk in, its one of the most validation labs I've ever seen. Instead of a funny name like "Everyone on slashdot complains of not sleeping because they think it makes them sound cool", name it another corporate department.

as mentioned in a previous comment, NeXT computer (founded by Steve Jobs, now owned by Apple) named their server room the Bat Cave as well. Mostly because it was filled to the brim with black NeXT cubes and NeXTstations.

Instead of putting a fixed nameplate on the door to the server room at the high school where I work, we mounted the kind that you can slide plates in and out of. The plan is to accumulate different plates over time and rotate between them.

Here are the ones that we've used so far (It's only been a few months):

Authorized Personel Only

Inner Sanctum

Pumpkin Patch

Santa's Workshop

Other suggestions are welcome (I plan to steal liberally from those already posted).

It also seemed like a good idea at the time to inscribe, "Hey! Put that back" on the front (covered) side of the faceplate holder.

Ages ago I worked with someone who (with malace aforethought) got everyone to refer to the small room where we delt with all the network/phone interconnects as "the Wiring Closet", and then started shortening it to "the W. C." in memos, and finally (once everyone was numbed to it) put a sign on the door with just the letters "WC".

is that anyone with a little social engineering can get a lead on what 'theme' you are using to name the boxen in that room. One place I worked had a complete Beatles theme going on; including some database passwords being obscure Beatles references like "28 if". The wallpapers on all of them were sketches of the band.

Yet another place used X-Files - hundreds of names and references and insider jokes I couldn't even figure out with my wife being the X-Files nutjob she is...

In a Coast Guard facility I worked in all the printers were named after Lord of the Rings characters - that's right we attached to Legolas to print our Remedy ARS reports.

My favorite has always been the name for a PBX/Server room at a national training facility I once worked in: The Batcave. Fortunately, nothing else inside was named after the comic - could you imagine the Nortel Meridian console being named "Joker"?

We name all of our servers on a theme, and this works well, in terms of isolating the names of the servers from their function. Our current theme is "philosophers" which can actually go on for a while.

If you pick a theme for your server names at the same time, the name for the server room can be quite straightforward. Name them after fish and a roomful becomes a school. Name 'em after birds and it becomes a flock. There are lots of collective nouns out there just waiting to be used.

So my suggestion would be to name them after orchestra instruments, so you could justify calling the place "The Pit":-)

I tend to arrive at companies when they are transitioning from "small" companies with a cool culture to corporate culture.

At the last place that I worked, we had a really cool descriptive naming scheme that was funny and very descriptive of where the computers were. The one day the CEO decreed that we would use naming codes... database servers would be renamed db01 db02 db03... web www01 www02.

Where I am now (a very large environment) hostnames are 9-12 characters long. There is actually a spreadsheet to name a server! You get gobblygood names like oapapa1234a1p, because every character needs to mean something. (That example would be an powerpc aix server running oracle in production with redundant power in production)

Put a placard on the door reading, "Manhatten Project", after the nuclear weapons programme, and name the servers after nuclear weapons, which could be descriptive, too. Fat man, little boy, then newer weapons: Trident, etc.
Or, go total geek and name them after Quake III characters. Lucy, Sarge, Doom, Xaero, etc. There should be plenty of them to work with.

Why not generate some completely unique names? Instead of using names from some Tolkein or Trek universe, use some random name generator [freshmeat.net] to come up with some funny sounding ones. Just make sure they have lots of syllables, and sit back listening to people pronounce them!

Name it after a historic event, a place in a well-known book, or perhaps even something from a movie.

Suggests:
The Matrix: Almost anybody gets that one
NeverNever Land: For MS machines, because that's where data goes too in some cases...
Tarterus (sp?): Depends on how much you like your job.

Might also depend on what you name your servers, or what you plan to name them. You could have a theme place from a book, and name your servers after the characters.

Which reminds me, I was going to ask a very similar question... as to what cool names people have heard for servers. We have ours named after Political Figures and trees here. I have the first server of my own being built and was thinking of naming it after a celestial body, or perhaps a galaxy

Server Room or Computer Room. SHEESH! I do like neat names and stuff but what does a name have to do with how it works? Why do you have to come up with a neat name for it? Why can't you just call it what it is?